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Mourning As a Control Mechanism in William Faulkner’S Absalom, Absalom! and the Unvanquished

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Mourning As a Control Mechanism in William Faulkner’S Absalom, Absalom! and the Unvanquished ABSTRACT PAGE, SUMMERLIN LEIGH. “Stubborn Back-looking Ghosts”: Mourning as a Control Mechanism in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished. (Under the direction of Dr. Nick Halpern.) In these two novels that involve the Civil War, Faulkner presents varying responses to loss. Rosa Coldfield of Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished’s Drusilla Hawk are women out of place in their society, without clearly defined roles. Both women attempt to gain control despite their lack of autonomy and refuse to accept their losses. Rosa Coldfield falls into a perpetual state of mourning, and Drusilla Hawk undertakes a series of actions in order to ignore her losses. Rosa’s grief consumes and infuriates her, and Drusilla’s coping mechanisms fail to help her come to terms with her fiancé’s death and her difficulties as a Southern woman who cannot live up to societal expectations. Drusilla’s failure to cope effectively with her losses is emphasized by her cousin Bayard’s ability to recover from the deaths of the two most important people in his life and create an existence without them. Bayard’s responses to loss exhibit how opportunities for mourning work and availability of new roles can help the grieving process be successful. Further, the women’s use of mourning as a method of attempting to gain control over their lives and surroundings is especially significant in light of the memorial movement after the Civil War. In the post-bellum South, women were proponents of memorialization and commemoration; these activities were also used to keep the “Lost Cause” alive. Through Rosa Coldfield and Drusilla Hawk, Faulkner expresses how grief can cripple those who cannot move on to new roles or find new purposes in life after a significant loss. “Stubborn Back-looking Ghosts”: Mourning as a Control Mechanism in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished by Summerlin Leigh Page A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts English Raleigh, North Carolina 2008 APPROVED BY: _______________________________ ______________________________ Dr. Anne Baker Dr. Michael Grimwood ________________________________ Dr. Nick Halpern Chair of Advisory Committee DEDICATION To my family: especially my parents, Ken and Tammie Page, who have been very supportive as I have continued my education, and to my grandparents, especially Edna Page and Elam Ray Summerlin, who have shown me the importance of the past and family history ii BIOGRAPHY Summerlin Page was born in Fayetteville and grew up in Godwin, North Carolina. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in English at N.C. State University in 2004, and returned for her Master’s degree in 2006. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Nick Halpern, Dr. Mike Grimwood, and Dr. Anne Baker for their direction, support, and patience. Also, thanks to Dr. Lucinda MacKethan, Dr. Deborah Hooker, Dr. Cat Warren, and Dr. Robert Young for inspiring me and putting up with me during my seemingly endless years at NC State. Thanks to Kara, Joe, Molly, Morgan, Elizabeth, Christina, Erika, Cap’n, Julie, Anna, and Seth for encouragement and understanding while I was busy living in books. Thanks to Jane for reading, Travis for library days, Marcia for reassurance, and thanks to Buck for reading, making suggestions, and being there. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Gender and Mourning in the Post-Bellum South ...………………………...... 1 “Impotent and Indomitable Frustration”: Mourning as Power and Purpose for Rosa Coldfield ...…………………………………………………………..14 Taking it like a Man: Drusilla’s Refusals and Replacements ...…………………………….28 Conclusion ...………………………………………………………………………………..44 Works Cited ...………………………………………………………………………………46 v Introduction: Gender and Mourning in the Post-Bellum South William Faulkner frequently wrote about losses ranging from the concrete to the abstract, and notable among these privations are his portrayals of people’s attempts to cope with a lack of significant interpersonal relationships. Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished, two of Faulkner’s novels that address the difficulty of handling loss, involve the Civil War and female characters who are unable to adjust to the post-war environment. These women, Rosa Coldfield and Drusilla Hawk, respectively, are unable to mourn their losses thoroughly and move on with their lives. Rosa’s life is a continuous series of losses culminating with an insult that ends her engagement, and Drusilla’s fiancé’s death in the war provokes several attempts to create a new role for herself, all of which lead Drusilla to experience further losses and repress pain. An examination of the South’s culture of mourning which stretched on for years after the Civil War reveals how mourning can serve as a method of deferring acceptance of loss or of denying loss altogether. Further, mourning may involve retelling and thus restructuring past events, making the past more acceptable to both the mourner and the society surrounding the mourner. These principles are pertinent to the struggles Rosa and Drusilla face, as women who lack opportunities and not only can not move on, but have no defined role in life to fill. Rosa and Drusilla cope with their lack of autonomy by refusing to accept their losses and hold on to the past as a means of gaining control over their lives, an attempt that proves futile. Death and loss are universal, but the ways in which they are handled vary according to place, culture, and era, and the universality of death renders mourning ubiquitous as well. Several scholars who discuss death in literature and art note that a person’s account of death 1 is always one remove from death, as it is one experience no one can have and then discuss. While we may discuss death while we live, we are conversing about an experience of death from the outside, watching another person leave life, and we are left with the work of mourning. While perhaps some people live such solitary or fortunate lives that they have not yet grieved for a loved one, losses of so many other kinds befall us so that everyone has most certainly experienced loss on some level. With any passage of time come changes and new life phases; even those who have not experienced the severing of some connection have at least moved out of one way of life and into another. Loss is something that everyone can understand in some capacity, and losses lead to grief and mourning, though the emotion of grief and the accompanying actions of mourning are often indirect and invisible. Even though grief is technically an emotional response, it can also produce physical manifestations. David and Dorothy Counts cite “cases where ‘grieving individuals withdraw socially, are lethargic, lose their appetites, experience sleep disturbance and depression’” (in Almeida 41). While these physical responses to grief can also occur with other life disturbances, they are very commonly associated with loss of a loved one or with a similarly traumatic experience. If the mourning process drags on, so too can the effects of grief. Rosa Coldfield is certainly socially withdrawn throughout her loss-shadowed life, and Drusilla stops sleeping and becomes very thin. Both women bear the physical and mental damage of extensive mourning. While grief is a feeling, mourning is both an action and a state of mind. Jacques Derrida refers to “mourning work,” and the term is fitting. In Freud’s 1895 “Studies on Hysteria,” he discussed “working through” an emotional trauma, and Paul C. Rosenblatt, 2 Patricia Walsh, and Douglas Jackson pick up this concept. Rosenblatt et al. include in the working-through process “acceptance…, extinction of no longer adaptive behavioral dispositions, acquisition of new behavioral dispositions and relationships, and dissipation of guilt, anger, and other disruptive emotions” (in Almeida 45). Clichés about dealing with losses abound, and when a death occurs, survivors often hear that time will ease the pain. While the passage of time is one factor in overcoming loss, it is passive and one must couple it with an active strategy. Just as people perform funerary rituals at the time of a death, they also go through other processes, both actively and mentally. While no readily presentable twelve-step program of grieving exists, one experiences certain stages after a loss and at times, they are predictable. Each culture, society, and even person has certain ways of handling loss, and some of these methods are healthier than others. People use coping mechanisms to handle difficulties that change lives in often unpleasant ways. However, if a person does not do whatever is necessary to complete the mourning process, he or she can drift into denial or perpetual grief. Neither state is optimal and either can be disastrous. Almeida writes about this dilemma in The Politics of Mourning, discussing Elizabeth Kubler- Ross’s “stages of grief” and William Worden’s “tasks of mourning.” Worden lists “accept[ing] reality of the loss….work[ing] through the pain of grief…. adjust[ing] to an environment in which the deceased is missing…. [and] emotionally relocat[ing] the deceased and mov[ing] on with life” (in Almeida 85-95). Without some action toward healing, the passage of time is not enough to end the pain of loss. Mourning is not just a personal phenomenon, but can be experienced by an entire society. One example was the mourning that took place in the United States after the death of 3 John F. Kennedy. Similarly, an intriguing and often disturbing bereavement came for the South after the Civil War. The South’s culture of mourning following the Civil War is significant for Faulkner’s fiction in terms of the longevity of mourning, its numerous purposes, and the difference in mourning between the genders.
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